Texas has a long-standing reputation, branded in the culture of the Old West, as a state that is tough on crime.

Since the 1990s, the Lone Star state has been locking up criminals at an incredible rate. But housing all those Texas prisoners — which state authorities say once grew to equal the size of the entire federal prison system — was costly.

Now, Texas has a new swagger that comes from a recently released U.S. Justice Department report showing the growth of the state's prison population is slowing to the extent that three new prisons slated for construction have been scrapped. At the same time, the state is becoming the unlikely new role model for a prison reform movement spreading across the country.

State Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano, and state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, worked across partisan lines to implement the “reinvestment movement” in 2007, which they say is just starting to show results. The program invests state funds in drug, alcohol and mental health programs to treat offenders rather than just prisons to house them.

“Texas is showing the rest of the country that if you look at research you can find ways to cut costs and crime at the same time,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center's public safety performance project, a nonprofit think tank. “Just this week the work that Texas has done was featured prominently at the national conference on state legislatures in San Diego. States are learning that they just can't build their way out of crime.”

According to the Justice Department's national report on prisons released this week, the number of admissions to Texas prisons increased by 0.4 percent in 2008, which is much lower than the average increase of 3 percent that had occurred since 2000. The Texas Department of Corrections also reports that its cellblocks are being vacated so quickly that the prison population has stopped growing altogether and instead declined by 1,050 inmates from 2008 through this monthto 155,076.

Reversing a trend

Bill Sabol, a U.S. Justice Department statistician who wrote the report, said Texas was also one of two states showing the biggest drop in imprisonment rates. The number of people imprisoned per 100,000 population decreased by 30, going from 669 to 639 per 100,000.

Yet the number of people incarcerated in Texas still far exceeds the national average of 504 per 100,000 population, he added.

If these reforms keep progressing according to plan, Madden said, “We will not need to build another prison for five years.”

That reverses the trend that began in the 1980s. Between 1985 and 2005, the state prison population grew 300 percent and Texas spent $2.3 billion adding 108,000 beds.

But by 2005, Texas had reached a turning point: Either spend half a billion dollars to house 17,000 new prisoners or spend less than half that amount to reduce the prison population through treatment programs.

The result was 10,000 beds were set aside for substance abuse and mental programs for probationers, parolees and prisoners,

“The research showed that our prisons were being overwhelmed by those who could receive alternative treatment to incarceration and therefore preserve our resources for the dangerous violent offender,” Madden said.

He noted drastic cuts had been made to community-based treatment facilities by the 2003 Legislature. By 2006 more than 2,000 adults were on waiting lists.

Other changes were also made, such as setting a maximum limit for parole caseloads so that parolees had adequate supervision and investing in a program that partners nurses with low-income mothers to teach childcare skills.

Parole violations drop

What worried some critics was that crime might have a resurgence under these “feel-good” measures, said Marsha McLane, Madden's policy director. “But a lot of times offenders would much rather select a stint in jail rather than going through treatment and follow-up,” she said. “The key is getting the right person in treatment, not the violent offenders.”

The results have been promising. The state reports a dramatic 25 percent drop in parole violators being returned to prison while the number of those being paroled has increased by 3 percent.

“We've made a marked improvement in the re-entry of people released from prison,” Madden said.

He added that county jails are now no longer being used to house prisoners for the state as used to occur.